Myopia on Gay History
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Stonewall was not the first spontaneous protest for gay rights, even in America. There is a documentary, for example, about the Compton cafeteria uprising in San Francisco well before that. There was Edward Carpenter, and a vigorous pre-Nazi movement in Germany associated with Magnus Hirschfeld and his institute. A few hundred years ago, there were "molly houses" in England, a term later picked up by Little Richard in his popular song, "Good Golly, Miss Molly," back when he was performing among drag queens in New Orleans and, perhaps not so incidentally, inventing rock 'n' roll.
That said, for sure lots of fit, horny, young men being thrown together, sleeping and showering together, talking sex together and masturbating (surrounded by other masturbating men in their teens and early 20s) must have had a salutary effect on a repressed youth's constant desire to ejaculate. It is interesting to look up other documentaries about 1940s gay and lesbian associations and advances political and social, such as the good times at San Francisco's Black Cat cafe, where evenings were ended with Jose Sarria leading a group sing-along of "God Bless Us Nellie Queens."
Of course, "gay" is to some extent in the eye of the beholder and does not necessarily mean two men were physically intimate, though Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman, to name two Americans, seem to have meant more than comradely affection in some of their writings. Fortunately, there is now a growing amount of history based on diaries of soldiers and sailors, details of pirate life on all-male vessels, and even lots of WWI soldier poetry* written in the trenches, often very loving and almost certainly not always "innocent" buddy-buddy affection. Consider also the wonderful books of WWII military photographs, often from official U.S. government sources, of young military personnel intimately relaxed and at ease with each other in a highly suggestive and evocative way, whether or not they were lending each other a helping hand or otherwise physically bonding.
But surely if cowboys, bargemen, underage street urchins (often paperboys a la Disney's musical "Newsies," based on a real century-old labor issue pitting boys against plutocrats) were finding ways to meet their needs in an all-male society, conscripts and volunteers could figure out how to accommodate their needs at least until they could get within reach of some "Mademoiselle de Armentiers." And while the scholar cited is discussing WWII, in the more naive and less panicked times of innocence during The Great War, after "the proud tower" fell in 1914 and the old world ended.
We often attribute the 1969 Stonewall Riots as being the birthplace of the modern gay rights movement.
But the first time gay people started coalescing was during World War II, according to USC gender studies professor Chris Freeman.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/modern-gay-rights-movement-wwii_561d103ce4b0c5a1ce607d4bThere is a wonderful anthology of emotional male-male poetry from The Great War, but my copy is packed away and a half hour online failed to turn up a reference to it. What did appear, however, was this article:
which I thought was profoundly moving and which I commend to your attention if you, like me, think there is something very powerful, special, and rarely admitted, that happens between men and which is different from the connections women have with each other, and also different from the ties men and women may have together. There is a very great power, more often suppressed or denied than celebrated, but which is also very profoundly romantic for all its secrecy.
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This topic made my week! ;D